The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America: African-American History (1991)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 16 May 2014
• views: 12497

The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that lasted up until the 1960s. Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910--1930), numbering about 1.6 million migrants who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern industrial cities, and after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved from the South, including many to California and other western cities.[1] Between 1910 and 1970, blacks moved from 14 states of the South, especially Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to the other three cultural (and census-designated) regions of the United States. More townspeople with urban skills moved during the second migration.[1] By the end of the Second Great Migration, African Americans had become an urbanized population. More than 80 percent of blacks lived in cities. A majority of 53 percent remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West.[2] A reverse migration had gathered strength since 1965, dubbed the New Great Migration, the term for demographic changes in which many blacks have returned to the South, generally to states and cities where economic opportunities are the best. Since 1965, economic difficulties of cities in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, growth of jobs in the "New South" with lower costs of living, family and kinship ties, and improving racial relations have all acted to attract African Americans to the South in substantial numbers. As early as 1975 to 1980, seven southern states were net black migration gainers. African-American populations continue to drop throughout much of the Northeast, particularly with black emigration out of the state of New York,[3] as well as out of Northern New Jersey,[4] as they rise in the Southern United States. The flow of African Americans to Ohio, particularly to Cleveland, changed the demographics of the state and the primary industrial city. Before the Great Migration, an estimated 1.1% to 1.6% of Cleveland's population was African American.[14] By 1920, 4.3% of Cleveland's population was African American.[14] The number of African Americans in Cleveland continued to rise over the next 20 years of the Great Migration. Other northern and midwestern industrial cities, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Omaha, and New York City, also saw dramatic increases in their African-American populations. By the 1920s, New York's Harlem became a center of black cultural life, influenced by the American migrants as well as new immigrants from the Caribbean area. Other industrial cities that were destinations for numerous black migrants were Buffalo, Rochester, Boston, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids and Indianapolis, and smaller industrial cities such as Gary, Dayton, Toledo, Youngstown, Peoria, Muskegon, Newark, Flint, Saginaw, and Albany. People tended to take the cheapest rail ticket possible and go to areas where they had relatives and friends. For example, many people from Mississippi moved directly north by train to Chicago, from Alabama to Cleveland and Detroit, and in the second migration, from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to California. Throughout the South, the departure of hundreds of thousands of African Americans caused the black percentage of the population in most Southern states to decrease dramatically. For example, in Mississippi, blacks decreased from about 56% of the population in 1910 to about 37% by 1970 and in South Carolina, blacks decreased from about 55% of the population in 1910 to about 30% by 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)